Punk and new wave had kicked in during the meantime and, although I wasn’t directly influenced by that music, it gave me a kick in the pants in terms of having the courage to try to shake things up a little bit. He later explained: Coming off an album as successful as that, we were being asked to get on this treadmill of clichéd thought and hash out the same thing again. Buckingham, tapping the competitive spirit of his silver medalist brother, saw these groups as competition and started writing raw, simplistic, groovy songs that were less reliant on the yacht rock production of his earlier work.
By the late ‘70s, bands like the Talking Heads and Kraftwerk were taking up space in record stores, David Bowie was no longer writing space-age stadium rock, and dum-dum goofballs like The Ramones were turning their guitars up and cutting the run times of their songs in half. The songs from McVie and Nicks have the same timeless qualities of their earlier work, which makes Buckingham’s lo-fi, spiteful tracks stick out like a sore thumb - something that was likely Buckingham’s intention.Īt the end of the tour in support of Rumours, Buckingham found himself the old man in the room.
On Rumours, their songwriting differences told a story of polyamorous heartbreak from different points of view, on Tusk the songs are akin to channel surfing with only three channels. "Tusk" was soft rock meets post-punkĪt the heart of Fleetwood Mac is the discord of the band’s three principal songwriters - Buckingham, McVie, and Nicks. Somebody once said that with the money we spent on champagne on one night, they could have made an entire album. And it had to be the best, with no thought of what it cost. Exotic food delivered to the studio, crates of champagne. Christine McVie later said of the band’s expenditures: Recording Tusk was quite absurd, The studio contract rider for refreshments was like a telephone directory. With an ever-inflating budget, the band paid for a 112-piece marching band, food, champagne, and enough cocaine to cover the North Pole. Once the deal was made, that was the last time anyone from Fleetwood Mac spoke to a label representative for a year. However, the label did pay to refit Studio D at The Village Recorder to the band’s specifications in exchange for the “Tusk” master tapes.
that they front the band the money to buy their own studio that didn’t happen. Enter: Mick Fleetwood, famous gadabout, de facto band manager, and the one person who shouldn’t be in charge of a band’s finances.įleetwood suggested to Warner Bros. Some time near the conclusion of the band’s never-ending tour in support of “Rumours” Lindsay Buckingham had an idea for the album follow up, his grand artistic statement, but he needed a big budget to match the sounds in his head and the band’s hedonistic appetite. The fractured and often confounding Tusk has aged better than records by the band’s contemporaries who played it safe (throw a dart at the ‘70s to find one of these bands), but even 40 years later it’s not a record that makes for an easy first listen. There was no thought of recreating the success of Rumours, the 1977 diamond selling album that bonds generations, but why go into the studio if you’re not going to create something meaningful? At the helm of the album guitarist, producer, and head agitator Lindsay Buckingham led the band to stretch themselves musically, sometimes for the best, but often in ways that only serve as experiments for sake of going to the lab. Conceived as a kind of “anti- Rumours” the album is chaotic and disjointed, finding its band members working in the familiar territory of chaotic heartbreak but without the need for success. Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 double LP Tusk was called ambitious, ragged, “gleeful and elusive,” fragmented, sprawling, “over-egged pudding,” and worse.
0 kommentar(er)
